Since I am not on facebook, a lot of the dramatic articles from both sides are (luckily) not on my radar until I see them here.
Fair enough.
Just to be clear, I have been very involved in politics since before I was old enough to vote; I volunteered in the early 1970s trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment (for women) passed. I have voted in every presidential election since 1976, and nearly all of the off-year elections. I do not watch Fox news or Rush Limbaugh. I try to get both sides of the issue, although that has been more and more difficult as the years go by.
This is actually really nice to hear. We might not agree on like, 80% of stuff, and I'm about to rant at you for like ten pages straight, but seriously, good on you for being so involved.
I am not a Trump supporter. I did not vote for him, nor did I vote for Hillary. I am not a Republican. I used to be a Democrat but am now Libertarian due to the party's steep decline. I am an American supporter, and am more embarrassed by the actions and speech of my own countrymen and women than I am of Trump's. Putting down your own country and agreeing with others who trash us is something that I will never understand or support.
Okay but you have to understand that a country is not a person. It is not inherently deserving of respect if it is awful. We tend to talk about countries as if they are single-minded, sentient entities, because it's convenient shorthand and often expresses what we're feeling or what we think others are feeling in a neat little package, but it's also misleading. A country can't be offended or upset or hurt or even really disrespected, because it has no feelings. All it is, is what people have invested in it, and that investment can, and should, be drawn back when the country represents something reprehensible.
America currently represents, and has honestly always represented, something reprehensible. It was created through the genocide of the First Nations, fully sovereign countries with their own political landscapes, their own positives and negatives, flaws and promises. The people who came here from Europe obliterated them and claimed their land as their own, totally wiping all but the smallest traces of an entire hemisphere's social system off the map and gruesomely slaughtering millions of people. They eliminated the honor of these people by portraying them as savages and deserving of the campaign of cruelty being waged against them.
And what did they set up in place of these unique societies they obliterated? A government that tolerated and encouraged a system through which countless millions of people were abused, raped, murdered, and dehumanized. George Washington, a man we revere today, was a disgusting man who oversaw the sexual violation, torture, and, y'know, forced labor of hundreds of people whose names were never even recorded. Slavery was present here for more than 250 years, significantly more if you consider the exceptions on either end of the historical timeline. That leaves a mark. People now are still feeling the influence of that dehumanization. Ruby Bridges is still alive and not even that old.
The country right now? It's a fascistic mess with a giant mean orange toddler in charge. It continues to exploit a loophole in the thirteenth amendment to force millions of prisoners to participate in what is essentially slave labor, and its law enforcement provides a steady stream of young, healthy black folks to keep that system going. It still mistreats the people who lived here before it was 'settled,' with their access to clean water being threatened, and the concept of them ever being truly sovereign again while America exists is laughable. Overseas it continues to serve select interests, strategically starting wars and involving itself in conflicts for one of two purposes: to maintain its image, or to benefit its economy. There are essentially no ethics on the international stage.
America is not only garbage in practice, it's garbage as a concept. The ideal of the American dream, of freedom for all, has never existed and isn't even supposed to exist, other than as an exclusive club of people who benefit from everyone else wading through ****. To so many people, the American flag represents a history of slavery, the destruction of their own national identity and culture, or a looming threat from halfway across the world that could wipe them out for no reason at any time and which they could never hope to challenge (you can't say you acknowledge and despise the drone program while denying this - note that scrutinizing Obama for this one thing while denying the military horrors our country brings with it overseas is tantamount to admitting you just hate the guy,
for some reason..). You cannot disentangle the ideals of the country from the bloody history those ideals are thrown over like a shiny tarp.
Loving something warts and all is hard when the whole thing is warts, is what I'm saying.
